With changes to equipment coming at some point, where can we get a big bang for our buck and increase our driving distance quickly? With fitness expert and personal trainer Shawn O’Neil
There have been some really interesting points made regarding driving distance at the elite level recently, and I want to pick up on a couple of them.
One suggestion to control driving distance was limiting tee height for professionals. I think the logic here was to control angle of attack, and in theory make it more difficult to optimise launch and spin to maximise distance. This may have come in response to the news that Cameron Young already has a ball in play that would conform with the initial proposal for the ball rollback and it doesn’t seem to be slowing him down much.
During this year’s Open Championship, the point was made by the commentators that given the firm conditions, fairway bunkering was essential to control distance. Given the makeup of the final leaderboard I suspected this wasn’t the case, so I crunched the numbers of the players in the top 10 plus ties.
The average ball speed of those 13 players was 181.7mph, which is around 6mph above the tour average. To put it into context, the minimum club speed to achieve this – with a perfect strike – is 120.3mph. Those reading this who know where their swing speed sits will appreciate how fast that is, especially out on the golf course with a specific target to hit.
This pattern continued down the leaderboard, where there were players including Bryson DeChambeau, Marco Penge, Kristoffer Reitan, Xander Schauffele, Hideki Matsuyama, Chris Gotterup, Brooks Koepka, Pierceson Coody and Jackson Suber.
I also picked up something else while watching golf on TV this summer.
I’ve previously written about how increasing your strength will increase how fast you can swing the club while making your body less susceptible to injury. However, something that really interests me from watching a lot of swings – and doesn’t require going to the gym – is how the best players in the world utilise ground forces.
You can get real bang for your buck by spending a small amount of time working on how you do this, and can unlock some speed really cheaply. Adding this to other gym work could be like adding a couple of cylinders to your engine, and it’s certainly something to consider with equipment changes coming.
